by Bill Cheng
You know, he owes for the month, your friend. I’m out a whole month on account of him.
Burke reached into his wallet. He found some bills and pushed them into her hand.
Inside, the apartment was bare. The windows were open, letting in the cold. On the floor where the bed had been, there were marks where the posts used to stand. An empty footlocker sat pushed against the wall. The landlady flipped the lid down and sat on it like a bench.
This is it?, Burke said. This is where he lived?
If the landlady had heard him, she made no sign. Her leg was propped across her lap and she was massaging the veins of her ankles.
Burke walked to the window and rested his hands on the sill. He tried to imagine Chatham’s hands there, looking out the same window. There was nothing out there. Flat, empty, nothing.
It true he took his own life?, the woman asked.
I don’t know, Burke said. Where are his things?
Sold them. Didn’t figure they’d do him any good now. Anything I couldn’t get rid of is in that closet there.
Burke pulled back the closet door.
You can take anything you like, but you won’t get nothing for it.
There were some clothes, worn through and moth-eaten. A hat that had lost its shape. On the high shelf he found a small box. He brought it down, the contents rustling within. He looked at the landlady and she shrugged. Burke blew the dust from the lid. Inside was a layer of fine white sand. He took some in his fist and let it run down his palms.
Is that . . . ?
He brought his nose to the lip of the box. It didn’t smell of anything.
He brought the grains to his thumb and tasted it.
Well?, the landlady asked. What is it?
Burke worked his tongue against his cheek. He wiped his hands on the side of his pants and returned the box to the shelf.
Table salt, he said.
AS THE CREWS LEFT FOR home, Burke stayed in his trailer and decided to get drunk. The sun was sinking low and the sticky air seemed to sit in his lungs like a tar. He reached into his drawer and found the bottle of whiskey his brother-in-law had given him last Christmas. He wiped the dust from the neck and pulled the cork with his teeth. Outside, the last of the men were boarding the bus back into town. He went to the door and stood in its frame. The bottle hung at his side. He let its weight sway on the hook of his fingers, tapping against his leg. The sun always seemed at its most brilliant going down. To the west, he could see the start of towers rising from the swamp. Skeletons. He tugged from the bottle, saluting them. The plow trucks and drill cranes bowed their clawed heads.
The clamor of construction work faded, overtaken by the chorus of crickets and toads, the low pulse of swamp sounds. The sky surged bright gold, then pale, into a poisoned gloom. Soon it was full dark and Burke could no longer see in front of him.
They put us in a wilderness, he thought. But this was their job. To be in this wild and to force it back, to bury it under concrete and stone.
It was time to check that the equipment sheds were locked. He got to his feet and groped for his coat and boots. Then he tested a flashlight against the flat of his hand. Outside, the gate lamps were burning. He followed the fence line west, toward the supply depot, shining his light through the spokes. There was no wind, just his cold white breath dissolving in front of him.
Outside, the light threw a long arc on the floor. It was a cloudless, moonless night and above him spanned a deep and pervading black with no stars to relieve it. At the edge of the light, something moved swiftly away.
He swung the light to a narrow gap between two trailers.
It was a cat, sleek and black with yellow eyes.
He laughed at himself and knelt down in front of it.
Come here, he whispered. He reached into the gap, clucking his tongue, but the cat retreated. He felt in his coat and found his pipe and tobacco. His hands were trembling from the cold, and he spilled the leaves onto his lap. He lit and drew deeply from the bit. Well, he said to the cat. Her muscular rump was raised high. She rubbed against Burke awhile, flicking her tail at his chin. When she realized that he had no food, she stalked away to sulk beneath the floorboards of the trailer.
He stumbled on through a field of diggers, cranes, drill trucks whose forms stuck up from the ground like sepulchers. He thought he heard a noise. The crackle of frost. Clothes swishing. He brought the light over his head and steadied it. There was the noise again. The small hairs of his neck stood on end.
He panned the flashlight across the ground, the light sluicing along the short blades of shrub grass. It caught on some small piece of wire in the distance. It winked at him. He moved unsteadily toward it and came to a large gate. The lock had been broken and the gate swung open easily with his touch. He passed through the portal and walked on. As he went, he felt the earth climbing, the ground beneath him becoming steeper and steeper till at last he found himself on his hands and knees, forcing his weight upward. When he came to the top, he was atop a large earth embankment. Below him, the darkness plunged for miles. He shone the light into the pit, but it was no use. There was no bottom. Soon the bulb flickered, waned, and died and he threw it down into the pit. The future lay sprawled in front of him—no shape, no form—the low white drone of water in the distance.
Frankie had reached her hand inside his neck and pinched off the gushing artery. She had saved his life and for this he hated her. He would no longer speak or eat or let Frankie near enough to change his bandage or lay to his neck any stinking paste. The gauze had turned stiff and black, and the wound beneath had started to draw flies. He was rotting and he did not care. In the corner of the room, he sat, his knees tucked up to his chest, staring hard at a knot of wood. She would speak his name and his eyes would drift up then fall away, uninterested.
Weeks passed in the swamp and the heat broke, calling down rain and wind. It whinnied through the trees and sent wood chips and twigs hurtling through the trails. When the storm had lifted, the sumac had begun to pink and yellowjackets menaced the air. The weather was turning and if they were going to live through the winter, they needed to go downland through the southern corridor where the waters were still warm enough to trap beaver and shoot wild boar. But Frankie worried that Rowbear would not survive the journey.
Mebbe it time t’leave Panther, she told Bossjohn. Go elsewhere.
Roan snickered.
You gon’ put on a dress and go they bugheway churches? Spin yarn wit all they bugheway women?
We can go to Snakebite Creek, she said. We can start again.
Bossjohn rose suddenly. His face was red and he stood hunched and huffing.
Pierre L’Etang come down to Panther by he’self. One man he clear here timber. One man he drag chain and when go him North to Beaver, we lay they old bones down in there palmetto. Mon pere all laid under in this swamp. This we mud. This we home. You no fo’getting that.
Frankie became quiet.
Bossjohn stewed moodily in his thoughts for a moment until finally he spoke.
You’s gon’ take Rowbear back ’a Flats and wait fo’ us.
You gon’ leave her with that animal?, Roan muttered.
Bossjohn looked into his brother’s eyes. Oui, he said.
Frankie cooked them a breakfast of fried cornmeal, and when they had finished, she watched them go, packs loaded, leaving Frankie her rifle, some shells, and enough food and water to last the week. The lantana closed up around them. They’d be gone a month. Longer if the game was scarce. Frankie kicked dirt over the fire and scrubbed the pan out with dust. She knew they were bound for a lean winter. She did not need Bossjohn telling her about L’Etangs. Her mother was Mathilde Haskins, and ’fore that, Mathilde L’Etang. Sweet Till, they called her. She was born of Horace and Therese L’Etang and was sister to Pierre, Maurice, Otum, and Tomas. She had flaming red hair and crooked
teeth and arms like a bear—thick and strong. Back then, L’Etangs were still in the north woods and had never set foot in no swamp. Sweet Till was six years old when she had hired herself out to the lumber camps, carting hatchets and shovels and handsaws to the men and taking the dull heads to the whet wheel for sharpening. She’d hone them herself, her nose bent low as she rode the sharp against the stone, watching it spark. When she was old enough, she got a job with the camps and swung those selfsame hatchets. She drank and swore, and she’d wrestle the arm off any man fool enough to try her.
When she was seventeen, Sweet Till had broken the arm off a Choctaw shipping clerk from across the border. He was her opposite in every way. Sweet Till was a friendly heavyset girl, loud and exuberant. The clerk, Mr. Haskins, was small, thin boned, quiet. Never said more than three words to anybody. Those who’d met him said he had a dark temper to match his skin, but he had a pretty face, Sweet Till would tell Frankie later, near like a china doll.
Frankie was never clear on why the small brittle 108-pound Mr. Haskins would lock arms with Sweet Till L’Etang. Nor could she figure what was in her father’s mind when he heard the pop deep in his meat, when his whole arm shuddered apart and folded back on itself. What she knew was that Sweet Till set his arm in plaster and took him home. She nursed him up on soup, sitting on the edge of the bed and spooning it into his mouth, though there weren’t a thing wrong with his other arm. Mr. Haskins spent a month laid up with Sweet Till, and when that month was gone, he was gone with it. And when Sweet Till began to show, she quit timbering and her parents sent her down-country where her oldest brother, Pierre, had gone years before.
She rode the train alone across the border, a plum-sized thing inside of her. There were no windows in her cabin, so she’d steal out to the dining car where the views were huge and wide, and she’d watch the country roll around her, the mountains white as bone and the crisp evergreens in the distance. She felt herself being thrust like a bullet into this land. The sun was warm and bright, and she stood there, her palms against the cool glass, until someone from the waitstaff asked her would she please return to her car.
Her brother met her at the station and he was different from what she remembered. She was small when he left home and she had in her mind the image of a boy, thin, brown-eyed and fair-haired with large front teeth and ears that stuck out from the side of his head, like an ass. But now he was older, balding, his skin bronzed. He had a small paunch, and his back had taken on a deep stooping hunch. Pierre’s front teeth were still large but there were less of them now, brown with chaw.
He came with his two boys, the older one almost a man, save for the fine down on his upper lip; the younger one hardly above his father’s knee. The woman Pierre had taken for his wife died the past winter, and all that was left of her haunted those boys’ faces. The dark hair. The dagger chin. Eyes so blue they made her shiver. Pierre pushed the boys forward to greet their aunt, and they each gave her a firm brave handshake. The little one, she would tell Frankie, would not stop crying.
She kept house for them in a small cabin on the outskirts of Panther Swamp. She dressed and cleaned their kills, fed them, swept out the cabin, and soon she found herself missing her days in the lumber camp. For Pierre, the world had opened inside the swamp. He killed beaver and nutria and wild boar, shot bears and panthers and swampdogs. He became renowned as a trapper in all the trading forts along the gulf. But for Till, the world had narrowed. Till who could singlehandedly fall a bristlecone in ten strokes and Till who drank fire and tore the arms off of men became Till the sweeper of floors, the darner of stockings. She hated this life, the swamp. She never told Frankie that outright, but Frankie could see it in her those months before she went North to Beaver, when the hate had marbled hard in her guts.
When her belly got big, Till got her hands on a stick of hickory and an old ax head and she made herself a hatchet. When the boys were out trapping, she’d go out to the back copse and get working. She’d hack away at the oaks, bringing it up across her shoulder, swinging down, the weight of the ax head swimming through the air. Piece by piece, she tore away at the oak, tore away at the swamp. And when a tree fell, she’d split its body into cords, bundle them up with twine, and carry them alone back behind the house.
She’d stocked that timber aiming to sell it and save the earnings for a little place in town for her and that bump inside her. She’d worked like that for six weeks, tirelessly, clearing away the land. Then one day, without telling her, Pierre traded the timber himself for corn whiskey, a new pair of fox jaws, and a hardly used Enfield rifle. They were on his land, he told her. They were his trees.
When Frankie was born, Sweet Till’s hair was already brittle as straw. The color was gone from her cheeks, and there were deep blue veins in her hands and ankles. Her breasts had swole uncomfortably.
Often she’d look at her new baby and could not believe it had come from her. Its skin was white and milky, like hers, but already, it looked like her Choctaw father—serious, easily offended, beautiful with brown-black hair, narrow pinched lips. It was either by chance or by fortune, but two days after Frankie was born, Pierre was killed. Him and his older boy had gone panther hunting in the northern ridge when suddenly the winds changed. The cat had sniffed out the two hunters and circled behind them. The boy John fired on the animal, killing it, but not before it had taken his father.
Sweet Till buried her brother out in the mudflats, and she would’ve lit out from the swamp right then and there, but Pierre’s boys, John and Roan, refused to leave. The older one had started to calling himself Bossjohn, and he took Pierre’s place as the head of the L’Etangs. He took his brother under his charge and he learned him to hunt and trap. The new baby he also put under his care. When little Frankie would cry, it was only Bossjohn who could quiet her, holding the large dangling thing in his arms, bouncing her softly, and Sweet Till understood. She’d been beaten.
For years she said nothing. She became resigned to her place among her brother’s children—sweeper, darner of stockings. Her cheeks turned wan, her eyes bloodshot. She fell sick often. She’d get dizzy and nauseated, and her mouth would fill with water. And one day, when Frankie was four, Till lay down under a bearskin rug and did not get up again.
Frankie remembered the night Sweet Till Haskins went North to Beaver. Her cousin Roan took her by the hand and led her out through the cabin doors. The moon was out, and Frankie felt the air move above her. There were owls winging silently through the dark canopy. She remembered what her mother had told her. One for good luck. Two for love. Black for life. White for death. She craned her neck up to see.
Roan took her to the dugout he and Bossjohn had built as a tanning house and they lay out on the smooth dirt floor. When she woke in the morning, their things from the cabin had been moved inside the dugout. She got up and ran toward the cabin, toward Till. But she paused in her tracks as she watched Bossjohn step out the front door. He looked at her, his eyes set hard under his thick brow. There was a cloth around his mouth and he pulled it down and took a big swallow of air. Then he took off his gloves and threw them in through the window. Smoke poured out and Frankie had the thought that that was her mother. All that was left of her, going up in gray black wisps, escaping through the slats, through the windows up into the air, toward the sun. Bossjohn knelt down and took her by her shoulders. She was tall, even then. He looked her square in the eyes.
You name L’Etang now, he said.
And so Frankie became who she was. She learned to trap and snare and shoot and muck and tell sign on the soft earth. She could tell muskrat from coon from possum. She could read the wind and pick them all by smell. When she was thirteen, she went panther hunting with Bossjohn. She remembered his command as he rose up from the blind. His breathing was smooth and easy. The barrel swung down and spat twice, one and two. And she remembered it was she who’d come to him. It was she who thought she loved him. He was older than
Roan. Less wild in the blood. And even though he was rough and hardheaded, it was Bossjohn she’d clung to for warmth those nights they camped out in the leaf. He was the one who kept them fed, who bullied the meat and blood and hides from the wilderness.
But it galled Frankie every time Bossjohn wagged on ’bout Pierre L’Etang, never giving no mind to Sweet Till who was twenty-two when she died, younger than Frankie was now, and had given to this place more’n the rest of them. Frankie felt her mother inside her, a long time buried now, emerging in a noxious twisting inside her gut. She cast her gaze around the empty woods, the shelves of mushrooms growing on the bark, the sunlight breaking through the thick wet air. This was her home and she was sick of it. She knew nothing of the world that Till had come from except that it was not here. Here, nothing moved. The mud would catch you and hold you till it dried you up and snapped you like a reed.
A LOW MIST HAD SETTLED down on the duff, and the morning sun made the air bright and ghostly. Grackles swooped down from their perches in iridescent mobs. Overhead the sun broke through cloud and tree cover. There was God in the morning, Frankie thought. The stock of the rifle was cantilevered against her shoulder, the barrel raised to a salute. She nudged the vines with the muzzle, clearing their path. Though he was still weak, Rowbear kept close to her, never falling more than a few feet behind. He seemed anxious and nervous, easily startled by the noises out in the deep swamp.
The gun was for his protection as much as hers, she’d assured him. There panther in here swamps, she reminded him. Above in the foliage, the branches riffled and Rowbear stiffened. Frankie laughed. Is okay, I protect you. They went for hours through the rough. The air had warmed and the rank of honeysuckle was thick around them. The ground had started to soften so they traveled upland where the soil would hold. By noon, they came to Mòskwas Run, a two-mile track of fast-flowing water where muskrat and nutria nested.
Frankie threw off her hat and knelt down by the run.
